Citation

Stokes LD. Canadian Journal of History 2002; 37(1): 41-73.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002)

DOI

10.3138/cjh.37.1.41

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article presents the biography of a leading officer in the Nazi secret political police, the Gestapo. It reconstructs the life of Heinz Seetzen from his birth in a northern German middle class family, through his education in the law, to his career as an enforcer of Hitler's dictatorship at the head of several Gestapo offices across Germany, and as the commander of a mobile execution squad (part of a so called"Einsatzgruppe") in the occupied Soviet Union, until he committed suicide in 1945 when arrested for his role in the murder offifty Allied airmen following the "Great Escape. " The goal of the study is to show how a legally trained university graduate became acculturated to the perpetration of genocide in fulfillment of Nazism's racist ideology. How representative was Seetzen of such killers? To what extent was he also motivated by opportunism and ambition? Should he be classified as an "ordinary German " or as a "true Nazi " in light of the crimes he committed? © Canadian Journal of History.

Language: en